Timberwolves Star Anthony Edwards’ Injury: Why He Chose Knee Surgery Now

Anthony Edwards has spent the better part of a year arguing with his right knee and winning most of the rounds. He won another one in Cleveland, on a night he was listed as questionable and not cleared to play until warmups, and he still produced the biggest scoring night of his young season. Then the scans came back, and the Minnesota Timberwolves star did the thing his whole season had been built to avoid. He stopped.

Most of the coverage since has read the news as a roster problem: who starts at shooting guard, how much more LaMelo Ball can carry, whether a fast start survives without its scorer. Fair questions, all of them. They skip the part that belongs to Edwards. This is a player who rushed back through two bad knees last spring, who came out of a summer of rest still feeling the right one, and who has now traded the awards case of his season for a knee he can lean on when it counts. His own camp says that was the point.

Edwards never really left last spring’s knee behind

The trouble is older than this season. Edwards played through runner’s knee, a chronic condition, in last season’s playoffs, Yahoo Sports reported, while a separate injury to his left knee cost him part of the first-round series against the Denver Nuggets. He hurried back from that hyperextended left knee after missing two games, by Yardbarker’s account, and still had two 30-point nights as an undermanned Minnesota took the San Antonio Spurs to six games in the second round. He was not himself in that series. He had already played a career-low 61 regular-season games, CBS Minnesota noted, with trouble in both knees.

He said he spent the offseason on rest and healing. It did not hold. According to ESPN’s Shams Charania, this is the same right knee that swelled on him a year ago, and he hurt it again in the season opener in Miami, a game in which he scored 45. On Sunday against Toronto, after a two-handed dunk in transition late in the first half, he headed back on defense gingerly and spent the next Minnesota possession in the right corner squeezing the knee, CBS Minnesota reported.

The next night was the second half of a back-to-back. Edwards was listed as questionable with the knee, played 41 minutes and scored 47 in a 127-125 overtime loss to the Cleveland Cavaliers. “Still, he just put up 47 points last night in Cleveland, but since has seen more imaging,” Charania said on SportsCenter. “It showed increased issues there.”

He chose the second half of the season over the first

That left two options: manage the knee for months or fix it now. “The Timberwolves and Edwards opted to address the situation now versus having it linger the second half of the season,” Charania said. Edwards will have an arthroscopic procedure on the knee, which the team had not confirmed publicly as the reports landed. Charania put the absence at up to two months. The Athletic’s Jon Krawczynski reported the surgery is set for Thursday, that “the belief is it’s going to be more than two months,” and that the team hopes he is back sometime in December and “fully ready to go,” with the timeline subject to how he recovers.

The price is exact, and it is his. Edwards was averaging 33.3 points, second in the league, and his 133 points across the first four games set a franchise record, breaking the mark of 120 he set himself two seasons ago, according to CBS Minnesota. Two months is roughly 25 games, enough to leave him short of the NBA’s 65-game threshold for MVP and All-NBA consideration again. His manager, Justin Holland, told Charania that was not part of the calculation: “It’s not about individual accolades or All-NBAs or anything else. It’s a single focus for Anthony Edwards, and that’s winning a championship.”

The Wolves built their summer around him

That focus has a roster behind it. Minnesota, which has reached the Western Conference finals in two of the last three seasons, traded Julius Randle and Naz Reid in the offseason and brought in All-Star point guard LaMelo Ball from Charlotte. Through four games the bet looked right: a 3-1 start, 122 points a game, fourth in the league, and the second-best average point differential, per Yahoo Sports. Now Ball takes on the bigger scoring load, with Ayo Dosunmu the likeliest candidate to step into the starting five. Minnesota went 12-9 in the games Edwards missed last season.

There is a fair question about the night before the decision. Yardbarker argued the Wolves failed to protect him, letting a star who had been limping and grabbing the knee against Toronto log 41 minutes in the fourth game of the regular season, in the middle of a stretch of five games in seven days. Nobody has reported that Cleveland caused the damage. What is on record is only that the imaging taken afterward showed more than the knee had shown before.

Edwards misses Golden State on Wednesday and goes under the knife on Thursday. If the December hope holds, he could be back around Christmas, when Minnesota plays an Oklahoma City team nursing its own injuries. The last thing he gave the Wolves on that knee was 47 points in a loss. The next thing he gives them is two months of absence, and a bet that the knee he brings back is one he will not have to argue with in May.

Tags: nba, Anthony Edwards, LaMelo Ball, Minnesota Timberwolves, NBA injuries